


On the Edge of Summer

by arestlesswind



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canon Compliant, Gen, Genderbending, Genderswap, Mother-Daughter Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-05
Updated: 2012-01-05
Packaged: 2017-12-13 07:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arestlesswind/pseuds/arestlesswind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their daughter: Odin’s eyes, Odin’s temper, Odin’s hands (Odin’s strength, even if no one save Frigga yet knows, she sees the thunder and the hammer, does not speak her prophecies), but Frigga’s will, Frigga’s golden wave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Edge of Summer

**Author's Note:**

> For a fic meme, for my dearest Katla, who requested “Frigga on girl!Thor maybe because that would warm my heart so.” YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND. Title from Vienna Teng’s “Daughter,” which, despite the title, bears absolutely no relevance to how I'd imagine Frigga and lady Thor’s relationship. “Lullaby for a Stormy Night” would be the Frigga+Thor song, always.

“It is a girl, your highness,” the birthers say, upon ceremony and unnecessarily, for the fact is obvious: small and skinny and red in her hands, blood-spattered limbs waving and crimson face split in a vengeful, frightful wail, as if she already knows; it shudders in Frigga’s ears like the distant thunder, approaching, assured, inevitable. They encircle the squirming body in gold robes pure as honey, return her to their queen, for their queen is now a mother and shall not be denied her right, and Frigga shushes the child, so much smaller than her sisters’, so much warmer, so much messier, holds her in both arms quivering from weariness and adrenaline and draws her near.

“Hush, dear one,” she whispers. “All is well.”

The healing stones are beginning to cool beneath her aching legs. The bedchambers stench rank of hot, frenzied exhaustion, bowls clatter and goblets sing as attendants rush to fill them with salves and cool water, soothe dry her sweat-streaked skin, the storm bellows a war cry and one of the trio of standing guards runs for the king and all of Asgard itself awaits, gathered outside the castle gates, uplifting hands and prayer and song, but Frigga hears nothing, sees nothing except her daughter, tiny and fragile and bearing the destiny of kings.

( _She thinks of the mother she knew naught, who perished in the act of life Frigga survived, and is grateful, so grateful._ )

“You need fear nothing,” she murmurs, tracing the plush pliant lines of this wondrous, frightening, beautiful new thing, thrilling to the thought, the realization, the surety she will come to memorize such lines, know them as her own pulsebeat, watch them shift and morph and fill with endless life. Her daughter hiccups in her crying. Frigga wipes the salty stains away with her own thumb, not the clean cloth extended and waiting at her side. Frigga knows the ways of such things as these, has held babes of kin and extended kin and ladies and lords of every realm come begging the queen’s blessing, yet in this bed of satin and down, in this stifling healing room, in this golden castle, in this universe that is hers by right and marriage, Frigga vows her daughter will never again know the cause of tears.

She cradles her, sings softly to her, laughs when she tangles chubby, insistent fists in her hair. Frigga shifts her carefully to her heavy breast and, with coaxing, the child begins to suckle. It stings, a sharp, twisting sensation, yet relaxing, rightness, fullness. Slowly, the prickling soreness eases, the tension in her jaw, thighs, throat, and Frigga leans back, sinks deep into the enveloping softness of the feathered bed, and rests.

Her husband’s eyes stare up at her from within her daughter’s face, blue as skyfall, blinking. When Odin arrives, war-heavy eyes lightened and lifted, he rests a tender hand on Frigga’s shoulder, kisses her temple, calls her beautiful and courageous and strong and his queen, his lady; christens their firstborn Thor, in tribute to the winds and rain that served as Frigga’s midwife. His warrior arms carefully, gently lift her from Frigga’s grasp, her own immediately ache with hollow emptiness; and he holds Thor up to his face, like meeting like for the first time.

“Thor,” he says again. Thor’s tiny goosefleshed hand spreads across his armored breastplate, captivated by the gold. He smiles. “My princess.”

( _Heir. Not my heir._ )

He speaks all and seals her fate and damns her with one word, and Frigga’s heart shatters and mends all wrong, like a knit-work stitched together by fumbling hands.

*

The giggle gives her away. As does the flash of red fabric, whirling as it disappears behind a tree. Frigga smiles and slips off her shoes, gliding on bare feet across the grass.

“Now _where_ could my little one have gone?” she wonders aloud. Another giggle, high-pitched, and Frigga paces herself toward Thor’s hiding palce, moss soft between her toes. They would walk this forest when first wed, she and Odin, he would escort her by the arm and tell tales and murmur affection. Now she has little time, between raising a child and daily expectations and politics, the aftershock fallout of this final war, and she savors this secret excursion of mother and daughter, the hot sun above and the dust that will stain the soles of her feet.

“When I find her,” Frigga continues, sneaking along, “I will scoop her up and put her in my stew and gobble her up…”

“No, you won’t!” A voice cries, and Thor leaps out from behind the tree in a defiant golden blur. The hair Frigga spent nigh an hour preparing falls from her pins in a disheveled mess, the knees of her scarlet dress are matted with dirt and the arms torn in little strips like thin branches. She thrusts a wooden training sword at Frigga with both hands, for it takes two tiny hands even to wield a practice weapon. She nearly tumbles under its weight. “No one eats the mighty Thor!”

Frigga darts forward and scoops her up and spins her, pretending to bite at her, and Thor’s shriek sends the nearby birds into the air. She laughs, the most beautiful sound to a mother's ears, clings to Frigga with one hand and the other to the sword.

“I win,” Frigga whispers, holding Thor up with arms made strong by child and will.

“Then we play again!” Thor bounces in her grip like a wild thing, a newborn pup, giddy and all fire. Golden and gleaming and blinding as the sun, irrepressible. Her merry child, laughing and dancing and loving and knowing no ill for the thought she is not even capable of.

“Tomorrow,” Frigga says, brushing strands of flaxen hair from her face. Each and every day after sunrise, when servants have risen and washed and dressed Thor under Frigga’s watchful eye, she fixes Thor’s hair. Sometimes braids, sometimes elaborate coils upon her head, sometimes loose and barely bound and streaming behind her running feet. Thor’s hair is thinner than hers, a little less curled, but that is the sole difference. Odin’s eyes, Odin’s temper, Odin’s hands, _(Odin’s strength, even if no one save Frigga yet knows, she sees the thunder and the hammer, does not speak her prophecies),_ but Frigga’s will, Frigga’s golden wave.

“Both of us must clean before tonight’s feast. Look what you have done to your gown,” she remonstrates, gently, no true critique. “Ruined, and so soon after the first. And this your father’s gift, brought from Vanaheim’s shores.”

Thor sticks out her bottom lip and frowns. “I want not a dress,” she mutters. “I want a sword.”

Something twists in Frigga’s breast.

“Perhaps when you are older,” Frigga says, and begins to walk back toward Gladsheim with Thor wiggling on her hip.

*

When her husband returns home victorious and covered in blood with only one eye and a naked male babe in his arms, he needn’t tell her anything.

“How could you,” she whispers. She shakes, rage making a storm all her own. “That was the only thing she had to her name.”

She flees from their bedchamber and leaves Odin standing alone, tired, eyes closed, the Jotun child wailing.

*

She takes the child as if he were her own, bundles him in silk, lets him take from her breast like a greedy hungry thing, makes him smile and wipes his tears with her hands and teaches him how to walk, holding him up as he stumbles.

Introduces Thor to him, _this is your brother,_ watches as Thor leans over suspiciously yet curious, pokes at her brother’s face and dark curls, cuddles him in her lap and makes him laugh and races him through the halls, never doubts he came from the same parents as she, never wonders.

Her children, one of her womb, both of her love.

*

“You know a woman king is impossible. It could never be. I had no choice. She will still hold her title as princess – the entire world will fall to her feet. I will deny her nothing.”

“Except her birthright,” Frigga says.

Odin visibly flinches.

Frigga only weeps when she is alone, weeps for her daughter and fate and laws and what could have been, should be.

*

Frigga knows before anyone else, before even Thor, realizes her daughter that bends the skies to her wish and dances with lightning and chases after her father’s heels, begs to enter the forbidden training grounds, picks fights with boys twice her age and scuffs her skin and tears her dresses and earns scorn from all except her family, demands why as firstborn the crown is denied her, will never be content with mere words, and when Thor finds her weeping, she can say nothing.

*

She is so proud of Thor, so proud she can barely withstand it, burning in her chest the greatest of joys - so proud, of her bravery, her unparalleled strength, the one thing she was permitted to inherit from her father, her will as immovable as a mountain, her smile brighter and bolder than the rising sun and how does the entirety of Asgard not fall to their knees in love for her, how -

\- her joy as she tosses Mjolnir casually in the air and catches it with one hand, her capacity for love wider than the realms, Loki, Sif, Odin, Fandral, Volstagg, Hogun, innocents and strangers -

\- her warrior, her one and only daughter.

 

*

Odin is slow, slow and weighted and labored to say, “This is…the only way.”

Frigga looks up from where Loki and Thor tussle in the courtyard, unalike and identical and glorious.

“I know,” she says, for she does, and curses fate and laws and watches as her daughter batters herself dead to forge her own path around it, through it, break it down with her own hands, for every Asgardian woman navigates webs of control and stoney paths and finds their feet tattered shards halfway through, and yet Thor, her precious Thor.

Odin sighs, stares at the heir who is and the heir who should, golden and dark, sun and moon, and Frigga takes his hand.

*

She does all within her power as queen of everything – places words in the king’s ear, weaves both her children stories as they lie in her lap, stories of choice and love and the beauty of difference, how one must chose their own path, how to make the dagger words of others roll off like water, to draw pride from their strengths, no matter how different they may be from the rest of the large golden world that is all they know. Turns her eyes away when she notices Thor sneaking out at night in Loki’s stolen armor, stolen sword in hand, when Loki begins to follow, pretends she does not see the tears in Thor’s eyes when she is rebuked, forgotten, denied by the very father whose approval she bleeds to earn. Accepts the tears when Thor can bear no more, falls into her mother’s lap though no longer a child, far too big-boned and bruised and a hammer weighing down her arm and yet that is still not enough and so old and yet so young, so utterly, painfully young, wanting only what all want and that which is more prized and more difficult to claim than the stars, for at least the stars are within the daughter of Asgard’s reach.

*

It is near midday, the sun warms her skin and spreads across the stone floors, it is Frigga’s second coronation, and she readies herself.

Hair, swept and braided and pinned high. Cosmetics, soft and cool and unshakeable as stone. Gown her finest, gold and beaded and thick, and the rest speaks for herself. No one doubts even for a moment she is queen.

She hears the footsteps and turns to the slightly ajar doorway of her chambers, inviting entrance without demanding. Thor has the grace to look abashed at being caught peering inside, eyes shuffling. She couldn’t muffle her tread even if she tried. Loki is the silent one, creeping upon his mother unawares, Thor everything his antithesis, and even Loki she intercedes, for she is a mother and she knows her children and the sound of their footfalls, and she knows when they need her.

“Thor,” she says, rising from her vanity. “Dear one. You look radiant.”

And Thor is, bedecked in her silver armor that shines even in shadow, the red cloak her father placed upon her shoulders. Golden, gleaming, shining. The only mishap is her hair, as always, long and loose and tangled without care. Frigga’s heart swells.

“As do you, Mother,” Thor says, tone soaked in sincerity, and when Frigga opens her arms they embrace.

Frigga tells her there is no need to fear; Thor scoffs, for she cannot appear weak on any days, today of them all, but no one save Loki can crack open Thor’s feeble, fragile shield better than her own mother; little slivers, tiny hesitations, and then earnest, open outpouring. Thor shares her reservations and fears about Loki, his upcoming kingship, his readiness, in a hushed voice afraid of a father’s sudden intruding presence and the loss of honesty. Her own status as leader of Loki’s guard, and as of last night, his advisor, his right hand - king, should the unthinkable, unbearable happen before he has wed and produced heirs. The Frost Giant attack, how she sees their red eyes and pinched teeth behind her eyelids.

She does not make mention of the finalization of her rejection, how after today there is no hope left for the crown to claim her brow, but Frigga needs not words.

And Frigga soothes her, strokes her cheek, tells of Odin’s coronation and a new wife’s own fears. By the end, Thor’s smile is light, her furrow in her brow not as deep.

“Mother,” she says, surprisingly tentative, their hands clasped between them.

“Yes, dear one?”

“Will you fix my hair?” Thor asks, quietly.

Frigga’s heart shatters and mends all wrong. She kisses Thor’s forehead and feels her daughter breathe, just for a moment, eyes closed. Thor sits at the vanity and Frigga slides her fingers into the waterfall of soft, thick hair, buoyed by the slight suggestion of curl; watches their reflections in the mirror as she divides strands, separates sections, weaves Thor’s hair until it falls in one long braid down her back.


End file.
